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13 December 2021: not really a review of Flux added.
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GREEKS BEARING GIFTS
Got the pendant on? Right.
Toby Whithouse? He wrote School Reunion! That’s a hopeful sign… mind you, if PJ Hammond couldn’t save Torchwood Whithouse hasn’t got a hope either…
OK, it’s obviously Tosh’s big episode. After six episodes of nothing, they’re going to need the picks and little brushes to try and unearth an actual character…
For a programme shouting about how it’s throwing away labels, how ironic is it seeing Tosh stereotyped as the swotty nerd? And then “It’s mostly just a disparate bunch of IT guys who live with their mothers”? Yeah, guys, let’s take the stereotyping all the way...
Did she actually say “How do you know about Torchwood?” Hahahahahahaha!
“How many of there are you?” Oops. Ah well, no need for retakes, it’s only BBC3…
So Tosh instantly spills the beans on what she’s doing to a total stranger. Well, that makes her about as professional as the rest of them….
The nobody to talk to shtick again? We just did that an episode ago…
Reading people’s thoughts, eh? Rummaging around in the Big Buffy Book Of Plot Ideas again…
“With this you can read people’s minds – it levels the pitch between man and God.” So God’s the Amazing Kreskin? Huh…
Oh, God, yet another sexual predator and more girl-on-girl action. Yawny yawn yawn. Must be tough for the slash writers when the official writers have got there first...
Oh, no, back into the Torchwood soap opera. No wonder so many places ban their employees from having relationships. They should use this Gwen and Owen footage as a training film….
Why would Tosh the computer geek ask Jack about Philoctetes instead of looking it up on Wikipedia like everyone else?
“So you secretly fight crime, is that it, Tosh?” Great line. At least there’s one…
So she can’t read Jack’s thoughts. What a gobsmacking surprise that is…
So the Vincent/Vanessa story makes Jack nervous? So much for gender inclusivity...
“This form needs to be fed.” Makes sense, and she isn’t human. What’s the difference between her killing for food and taking cattle to the slaughterhouse? Talk about hypocrisy…
It’s like Jack’s dead? But we knew that! We’ve known it from the beginning!
For God’s sake, take the bloody thing off.
It’s depressing. Greeks Bearing Gifts ticks all the boxes: alien (at last!), inner conflict, intrapersonal conflict. It’s exponentially better than Countrycide, and it’s much better than all of the episodes thus far except Small Worlds. Nevertheless, it’s still as dull as two weeks at a paint-drying seminar. Why?
Some of it’s the writing, which after School Reunion breaks our hearts to say. So much of the angsting is wordy, melodramatic and stagy: none of it sounds like real people talking.
Some of it’s about the fact the these characters have been stuffed up so comprehensively that we just can’t bring ourselves to care about them even if interesting things happen to them. Naoko Mori does a great job in her long-delayed character piece, but we’re just not feeling her anguish over Owen: he’s such a tosser we just think she should feel grateful he’s goo-goo over Gwen. And her deep deep pain about the state of the world is all very sad and all, but we’ve seen it so often before it just bounces off. The Jack stuff isn’t anything we haven’t known since the moody building-scaling at the beginning. Ianto’s misery is exactly as you’d expect after what he said in Countrycide. And Owen and Gwen... let’s just not go there, or we will require a sickbag.
As for the alien/thought-reading stuff: “seen it all before” doesn’t begin to cover how hackneyed it is.
And that’s the trouble: it’s not badly constructed, but it’s so uninvolving. We’ve seen the plot before, we’ve seen the conflicts before, we’ve seen the character motivation before. There are no new spins here whatsoever. We just. Don’t. Care. In the end, it’s a load of tosh.
Countrycide Review
